The Mystical Cloud Unicorn – Part 1

Finding the perfect Channel Cloud Partner

Oh they do exist, but they are hard to find and even when you do find them you’re immediately struck by the fact that there are not enough of them to make an impact and deliver your, now all too real, monthly recurring and cloud numbers,,,

Channel Sales Leader Night Sweats

Your mind wanders as you drive to your next appointment or perhaps its late night and you’re in the midst of a dream - either way you’ve seen the vision – the perfect monthly recurring revenue partner, capable of driving and growing cloud revenue in a consistent and sustainable manner without tons of help.

It seems so real, they have all the right attributes – they are committed to you and your strategy, they’ll protect your core transactional business while simultaneously growing net-new subscription-based revenues that are critical to your future, they’ve created a truly recurring revenue friendly business and financial model, they understand that a new sales model is required, they’ve actually crafted a sales plan that drives and rewards sales professionals for building a portfolio of monthly recurring revenue (MRR). Oh boy, I can clearly see the future…

They’ve got a solid go-to-market (GTM) plan that allows them to grow sales month-over-month with the right value proposition that’s differentiated and solidly showcases your solution-stack. They’ve committed to a marketing 2.0 model that allows for velocity, net-new client acquisition and the subscription based revenue that customers are clamoring to consume. This is really good, I don’t want to wake-up…

They have solid business development skills and have crafted a solid pricing and packaging approach that positions them to be long-term players. Finally, as you toss and turn they’ve actually committed to and created an operations model that includes all of the systems, processes and tools needed to operate at digital speed and there are thousands of them roaming the customer landscape. This is nirvana…

Then you wake up, it’s just been that recurrent dream that never seems to manifest itself in the here and now and even if it did, there aren’t thousands – there’s not enough of these mystical partners to make a dent in your channel sales goals. These are the night terrors that most channel sales leaders have day-in and day-out… Oh by the way, so shouldn’t most VAR’, ITSP’ and MSP’ leaders who aren’t monthly recurring revenue friendly and focused on conquering the cloud subscription-based business model.

You shake it off and then realize you’ve got s tremendous asset that helped you drive numbers in the past - perhaps we can mobilize this fantastic asset to help us shift our business to include the right balance of monthly recurring revenue that IT buyers are demanding today. Will this dormant asset embrace the challenge? You better hope so…

Yeah, the good news is you do have a loyal and productive channel partner community. Who are realizing that if they are to drive profitable business and increase their valuation they need a larger portion of their business mix to be MRR and cloud-centric.

The bad news is that if you’re lucky perhaps 3 – 5 % of your partners are truly positioned to be a recurring revenue friendly subscription business. Damn, you’ve run the numbers and at a minimum you need 20% of them to be ready to hit your 2017 cloud revenue targets. You also shutter as you realize it takes the typical partner twelve (12) months to truly transition and become a consistent MRR producer – damn the numbers just don’t work, we’re screwed…

Perhaps, but there are ways to accelerate the journey for your partners – if they are committed to the journey… Problem is you, like many vendors, are stuck in the same unvirtuous loop as your partners – you keep hoping the “tried and true channel enablement playbook” will take hold and maybe, just maybe the next 4-hour, ten (10) city transformational cloud roadshow will bear fruit.

Something will show up in that damn point-of-sale (POS) report that’s different and new this time, won’t it? It won’t – the old approach of spray and pray won’t work on this problem set. This is a business adaptation problem, not a technology adoption problem. So, it can’t be addressed via a volume play where if we provide enough transformation workshops we’ll eventually hit enough partners to fix the problem.

Again, spray & pray is not a strategy, it’s yet another nightmare that provides false hope and night sweats. Deep strategic partner development is what’s needed.

Hope you found this brief insightful and as always, I’d be interested in your feedback. Please stay tuned for my next brief which will be a companion piece - Part 2: A Prescription for a Good Night’s Sleep.